Canberra, 18 April 1962
Personal And Secret
I am much overdue in my answers to your most interesting letter of February 8th [sic],1 and some aspects of your subsequent cabled messages.
Your offer to come to Australia for a hurried visit after you have been to Canada is extremely generous.2 But the ANZUS Meeting occurs here from May 7th to May 9th. Parliament resumes on May 1st for what l hope will be a period of not more than a fortnight. A visit by you would therefore occur under pressure of the time-table. This does not mean that it would not give us all great pleasure; but it does mean that it would, in relation to the great issues which we have under debate, impose a considerable travelling strain upon you without making possible adequate personal discussions.
It is one thing for you to go to Canada, which appears to be considering the Common Market problem in the general rather than in the particular; you may well exercise some persuasive influence upon Diefenbaker to ‘get down to brass tacks’. It is quite another thing to have discussions with us, who have, right through, been prepared to pursue pragmatic lines of consultation, which involve much complicated detail.
McEwen returns to Australia on April 25th, after strenuous labours on your side of the world, and will be able to report to us on the position as he sees it. I will then decide my own course of action.
The importance of all these matters to Australia is so great and my responsibilities to my own country so pressing, that I am at present disposed to make a special visit to London in late May or early June. Such a visit, not cluttered up with official or formal engagements, would enable me to have, as I hope, close personal talks with you, with those of your colleagues who are handling the negotiations, and with some of your principal official advisers; not necessarily en masse but in a personal way. This would give me a degree of understanding not otherwise attainable, and might well help to clarify attitudes on both sides.
Whether I can attend the Prime Ministers’ Conference on September 10th is by no means certain, since the Budget Session will be on; but there is time enough to decide who will represent us.
We have accepted the date, which appears to suit most of our Commonwealth colleagues. But, frankly, I have some persoual reservations about the intrinsic value of the proceedings.
The first is that I fear that it will be too late to be effective in relation to the Common Market negotiations, and that the debates will tend to be both generalised and retrospective. The second, (which bears upon the first), is that I am completely sceptical about a meeting of fourteen Prime Ministers, few of whom have trade problems in common, achieving concerted views upon such complex matters.
For example, Heath’s recent statement on the political implications of acceding to the Treaty of Rome goes far beyond what Duncan Sandys was putting to us in Canberra.3 It envisages a political integration the virtues of which I can clearly perceive, though its problems, deep in history, are yet to emerge. How this will affect the Commonwealth relationship is no doubt arguable. If the Prime Ministers begin to argue it, the economic problems will not be fully argued at all. A week is not a long time, at the rate of a few hours per day.
In spite of all this, I think that a Prime Ministers’ Conference must occur. But from my own point of view I would attach much greater practical value to a week spent by me in London in which, without benefit of Ghana or Ceylon, but with all the benefit of old and tried comradeship, we could speak together as men do, having ‘tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky’.
I turn now to your survey of February 8th, with its rich table of food for thought.
I have no desire to rake over the ashes of our last meeting, which left me sad and depressed.4 But one comment should be made. I doubt whether our coloured colleagues would have pushed the matter so hard or so far if Diefenbaker had not given them such a lead. They would have realised that to divide the Commonwealth on colour lines would be fatal to the continuance of the ‘new Commonwealth’. But Canada relieved them of that fear, with the results we know.
But I still doubt the viability of the new Commonwealth. For most of the new members, the cry of ‘anti–colonialism’ seem to be the raison d’etre of nationalism. For, as we see so clearly out here, ‘anti–colonialism’ means ‘out with the white man’. Why do we take such pains to keep countries like Ghana in the Commonwealth? They appear to have less affinity with our own conception of freedom than they have with Moscow and Peking. They will cheerfully use the threat (and follow the practice) of going to Moscow in order to extort aid from other Commonwealth countries, particularly Great Britain. In any event, Ghana is a ruthless dictatorship, with no rule of law, with five years of arbitrary ‘preventive detention’ for political opponents, with not one shred of the historic British institutional sense. I have great hopes of Nigeria while Abubakar Balewa Iasts.5 Ceylon seems to be a mess of neo-Marxist pottage. Standards are falling. Church schools are confiscated. The judiciary, once so good, becomes the servant of political policy. There is racial and religious bitterness. There is feebleness at the top. But why go on? You are familiar with all these things.
I do not quarrel with your history, and in any case would not dare to do so. You are right when you say that our instrument of government is out of date—though I cannot think of a better one. Our sons may hope to modify it, but I hope they will not wish to destroy it. The Chartists wanted annual Parliaments, little knowing what futility they were seeking. The great art and self-sacrificing profession of Politics is sneered at by the Press, whose controllers are self-elected, and the confidence of whose views is in direct ratio to their ignorance. The business of Cabinet is to think and to perform. But what time do we have to think? Cabinet meetings are squeezed in, and are rarely intellectually exhaustive. In Australia, the distances from electorates are so enormous that some Ministers have to choose between doing their Cabinet duty and, as absentees, losing their seats.
You, as a scholar, and I, as a reasonably semi-literate, know all too well that reading and thinking become more difficult at the very time when they are most needed. We are all so up-to-date, so concerned with the current problem, that history is neglected and its guide-posts torn down.
But I still believe, in my elderly bones, that we must ‘remove not the ancient landmark’. And so I come back to the Commonwealth.
Any enthusiasm I had for the new one is waning fast. People like me are too deeply royalist at heart to live comfortably in a nest of republics. An ‘old’ republic, like the United States, seems different. Some of my American friends seem to be Monarchists manques. They love titles, such as those of ‘Ambassador’, or ‘Governor’, or ‘Colonel’, which, by social practice, endure. They have their own hierarchical ideas. But the new republics seem to thrive on antagonism. In the depths of our being, we have little or nothing in common with them.
So, what are we to do about this new Commonwealth?
We cannot have a first eleven and a second eleven. All members of the Commonwealth are equal, even though, as in the first law of physics, they are sometimes ‘equal and opposite’. When we have twenty or twenty-five Prime Ministers, with their accompanying Ministers, Conferences will be like public meetings. There will, of course, be value in meeting each other and making contact with the Queen. But clearly the more prosaic usefulness will be weakened. It will be difficult to speak in the old way, intimately and confidentially, in the presence of some potential enemy or of others who are declared neutrals.
We cannot, however, consciously alter the structure. What we must seek to do, in my opinion, is to discover ways and means of holding the ‘old brigade’ together. This is a serious and urgent task, for there are plenty of divisive influences at work. We cannot perform it by holding special conferences limited to the Crown countries. But we could try to do two things. The first is that, during the currency of a full Conference, a few of us should arrange to meet privately over dinner; cutting out for this purpose one or two rather tiresome formal receptions. The second is that we should have more frequent bilateral talks; not necessarily to discuss specific issues which are engaging our attention, but to keep our friendships in repair.
l hope that we shall be able to talk about these matters fairly soon as, like you, I am anxious about them.
My wife will be under close care and treatment for a few months; through sheer exhaustion she has developed a lung condition which must be arrested and cured. But the doctors seem quite confident.
1 Document 162. Macmillan’s letter was dated 6 February.
2 Document 179.
3 See Documents 144, 145, 146.
4 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, March 1961.
5 Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, first Prime Minister of an independent Nigeria. Assassinated in January 1966.
[UKNA: PREM 1113665]